About Madeline

Madeline is committed to giving pleasure its rightful due. An experienced and engaging facilitator and speaker, she has hosted 100s of personal and professional development events over her 25 year career. Now she brings that expertise to helping you feel more alive and embodied, and to learn how to use pleasure as a resource for healing and growth.
Madeline practiced as an integrative psychotherapist with a Masters Degree in Health Psychology and Counselling for many years. Now she does her healing work as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner www.traumahealing.org and a spiritual counsellor and teacher. She also supports other helping professionals to bring a somatic perspective to their work.
Madeline lives in central Canada. Her relationship with nature and spending time with her community of family and friends are her most treasured ways to access pleasure.

Tracking aliveness as a lived experience in the body has been a prime motivator in my life. That has meant learning how to create more of what brings me alive, how to expose myself less to what deadens my spirit, and how to cultivate attitudes and practices that enhance consciousness and personal power, so that my life can be one of sacred beauty, creativity and joy.

Along the way, sharing what I’ve gleaned from this journey with others has come naturally to me through my roles as teacher, therapist, trainer and community member.

These days I’m exploring the theme of aliveness through the lens of pleasure. My strongest skills are the ability to inspire, encourage and educate people about the value of recognizing and embodying what gives them pleasure and how that can bring them alive.

I’m really drawn to pleasure as a means to help us all find and embrace wholeness. I’m equally curious about how pleasure works in day-to-day living and in intimate relationships; specifically how, when we increase our capacity to unlock pleasure in one area of life, it will enhance other aspects that we live.

Unlock Pleasure is the name for this work. And my family name, Dietrich, means key in German – the antique kind, known as a skeleton key. This key is considered a master key because it can bypass all lock mechanisms and unlock any door. Metaphorically, it means to bypass all obstructions. So my work plays on this symbol, having a key that can open doors to what has previously been denied. Unlock Pleasure offers keys to a greater capacity for pleasure and opens the doorway to learning how pleasure can deeply heal us.

In 2013, I completed the Somatic Experiencing Professional Training Program. This training was to be a refresher course for me on somatic-based (or body-based) trauma treatment. And while it is an excellent modality for treating trauma, what really caught my attention was how well it fits with the work I do in supporting connection with the body – helping people strengthen their ability to feel more alive in their bodies – and to track and use their experience of pleasure as a positive reinforcement to facilitate this shift out of their heads and into their bodies.

To this exploration, I bring 25 years experience as a spiritual teacher, facilitator, trainer and therapist who has worked with thousands of individuals and groups in one-on-one encounters and through workshops and retreats in Canada and across the US. As well, I have Masters Degree in Health Psychology and Counselling, and am trained as a spiritual teacher and counsellor with the Pathwork

I believe this work on pleasure has tremendous value for other helping professionals. To date, my offerings in professional development to counsellors, therapists of various kinds, as well as the coaching world, has covered the themes of sexuality and relationship issues; the interface of spirituality and psychology; and the spiritual impact of trauma.

“Madeline offers a safe space to explore what it is that blocks our capacity to live in pleasure. She supports us to recognize our unhealthy associations with pleasure, so we can finally open up to that which provides real power, serenity and love.”